Call phone is now available in Google Mailhttp://www.google.com/chat/voice/You can call to US phone numbers from any country for free. In short, calls to USA and Canada are now free (if you call from GoogleMail).

NOTE: To get "Call phones" icon in GMail, you have to change to English (US) language in the Settings of GMail.

On Ubuntu 9.04, I opened my GMail account with Chrome browser, clicked on "Call phone" icon, and I was proposed to install voice plugin. In short, the proper deb-package was installed about automatically.Then, I dialed my "real" US phone number on Ubuntu, and Twinkle on Arch began to ring.It works, but playback/recording does not work with google-talkplugin and OSS4.The same problem for Google Voice/Video Chat

As a result, I got playback in "Goolge Call phone", but microphone does not work.Thus, I can now tell something to Twinkle "US phone" and hear it in Ubuntu, but with latency (time-delay) of about 1 second (it is too much for softphone).The same problem for Google Voice/Video Chat

CONCLUSION: Any sort of ALSA emulation is of no use, because of latency (time-delay).

PulseAudio was removed, but there was still a small latency (time-delay), and ALSA sound was not very nice. However, it was already usable, actually normal. Perhaps, you cannot get anything better with ALSA.

In a word, Skype, Twinkle, and other softphones and web conferencing tools tend to compress sound to 16 kHz (or even 8 kHz) sample rate. Ordinary internal sound cards usually cannot play such things (or they have very bad resamplers inside). This actually means software resampling, and this is the reason for bad sound quality, noise, harmonic distortions, and latency (and CPU load) with ALSA and, especially, with PulseAudio.Software resampling with ALSA means not only latency, but also overtones of 50Hz (for notebooks and netbooks with poor electromagnetic shielding), that is, unpleasant noise. The same problem is for Windows. A practical solution for both ALSA and MS Windows (to improve sound quality) is iMic USB with a cheap analog headset (earphones + mic).

NOTE: My IBM notebook has very good electromagnetic shielding, but, newertheless, you get overtones of 50Hz in the recording (with iMic USB and without), if you run Ubuntu + ALSA + PulseAudio, even if it works only on battery (!!!) - the 50Hz come from DSL modem (and PulseAudio - especially overtones).